Several people have read this article and thought that I was a fascist sympathizer so I figured I’d better clear a few things up. First and foremost, I am not a fascist sympathizer.
Duh.
The Holocaust was wrong, anybody can see that. It was wrong, wrong, wrong. It was just as wrong as the American policy of genocide against the Native Americans. It was just as wrong as the American institution of slavery. It was just as wrong as the incarceration of Japanese Americans by other Americans at the same time that Hitler was doing the same thing to Jews. But the difference between these events and the Holocaust is that modern American moviemakers have not gotten into the habit of making Americans stock, cartoon villains that they can portray anyway they please or kill off at will without ever suffering any moral public backlash.
This, to me, is not a responsible way to reflect upon the most significant event of the last hundred years. When they say that we can never forget that the Holocaust happened, they don’t mean that we should remember the Nazis as an evil that has come and been defeated and who we can now prove our own moral worth by how artistically and loudly we can curse them. The situation is far more complicated and we owe it both to the survivors of the Holocaust and those that died to treat it with a bit more respect.
Too often, movies blur the line between the fanatics of the Nazi party and just the regular German people who were doing their best to get by. Now, this is not to say that those people do not shoulder their share of guilt for not making a greater effort to stand up against what was happening, but there is not a set of eyes that will read these words that hasn’t won the privilege of survival, either directly or through the acts of his/her ancestors, by failing to act to stop an evil deed. Majority rules, sometimes in a fashion that is completely immoral. The Nazis are the worst example of this, and though Hitler himself never won a majority in a popular election when he came to power the majority followed him rather than take on the burden of bringing him down. The situation got really screwed up, but it wasn’t one act or one deed that allowed evil to come to power, it was a bunch of little things, thousands of them, that happened to line up. And it was all made possible not because of some aberration in the genetics or moral integrity of one group of people, but because of a flaw that is at the very foundation of human nature and is still alive and strong in all of us today.
That’s the lesson that you should take from the Holocaust, that evil is allowed to succeed because everybody, not just one evil genius, allows it. Evil happens because it is easier to stay silent and go with the group than it is to stand against them and force them to admit their error.
In the case of Nazi Germany, there were probably about two or three thousand people who deteriorated to the point of being truly evil. These were the government administrators and the guards and wardens of the death camps, the people who knew what was really happening. There were thousands of others who might have suspected what was going on, but didn’t have enough evidence to really believe it. The “Final Solution” was a huge secret. More people probably figured out what was going on as the war continued, but by then it was too late for them to do much to change it. It was the type of thing that was right in front of everybody’s face, but something that nobody wanted to believe, so they didn’t look too hard. That is not an excuse, but it is more than can be said about American slavery, everybody knew that was going on and the horrors that accompanied it.
The thing that really bothers me about our current self-righteous view of the Germans during world war II, is that it prevents us from understanding the real truth, and it places an unfair stress on the German people living today. I’ve met a lot of Germans, they’re nice. They’re good people, but they’re all extremely sad and carry a guilt for these events that they had nothing to do with. That isn’t fair and it isn’t right and it leads us in a direction away from what the Holocaust should teach us.
Many people have written me and told me that they understood the point of the following article, but this is a touchy subject and I don’t want any confusion. For a while, I was tempted to take it down, but I’ve decided not to because I think this is an important point that needs to see the light of day. Movies are perpetually being accused of getting history wrong, that just comes with the medium, but at some point somebody has to say something when it becomes socially acceptable to trade in a reasonable discussion of the event that reveals the most unfavorable components of human nature in favor of making it into a bunch of cheap, moralistic grand-standing that is repeatedly cashed in for a surefire ticket to critical adoration. If you don’t like a movie that denounces the Holocaust our current social environment says that you are evil, regardless of if the film is actually a respectful discussion of the theme or not.
Obviously, I’m not in favor of the Holocaust. Anybody who reads the article below and thinks that is an idiot who is too lazy or too proud to admit that they themselves are just as capable of the evil that they are so quick to denounce. That is the attitude that leads to horrific events like the Holocaust.
Mostly the point of my article was to suggest that a movie that denounces the Nazis shouldn’t use the same tactics of propaganda that the Nazis invented. Perhaps the Holocaust is a theme that should be left to documentaries as it is too important and too powerful to be played with by privileged artistic directors who know nothing about it. Or maybe it is a theme that should be reserved for artistic directors like Roman Polanski, who actually lived through it, and suffered it, and in whose work you can still see a responsible treatment of the issue and even German soldiers portrayed in a positive light.
There is a line that people used to listen to, Judge not lest ye be judged. I wonder how history will look back on America in these times. Times of a falsely elected president and an illegal war on a sovereign nation. That, too, should have been stopped, but the thousands of people whose responsibility it was to speak out at the appropriate time, stayed quiet because it was the easier path. A filmmaker who really understood the significance of the Holocaust would be spending his/her time making movies exposing these modern evil doers, at great personal risk, rather than attacking a sixty year old subject that s/he knows will bring nothing but praise.
Just some thoughts.
Some Thoughts on Saving Private Ryan
For some reason completely unknown to me, I started thinking of “Saving Private Ryan” the other day and decided that I have to clear the air about a few things. Believe it or not, there are people out there in the world who believe that this is an enduring classic that will live beyond our time as an example of divine and beautiful art. That it is not. And if you bear with me I will prove it.
You know, the thing about movies that you have to be careful with is separating the propaganda from the truth. Ironically enough it was Adolf Hitler who was the first to exploit the power of film As crazy as Hitler was, he remains an undeniable genius when it comes to the art of propaganda, an art he perfected and which the United States is still endeavoring to improve upon whether they will admit it or not.
It was Hitler’s pet project “Triumph of the Will,” which he filmed with the brilliant Leni Riefenstahl (a director who is in many ways comparable to Steven Spielberg in her pure talent of capturing compelling images and constructing a gripping story), that helped propel the fervent love for Nazism among the German youth. “Triumph” was aimed at the naive crowd of mainly 18 year old boys and girls or younger who had been stripped of parental figures from the first world war and were desperate for some kind of patriarchal figure. Hitler gave them the Fatherland, and they ate it up with the enthusiasm born of basic human deprivation, not evil. The evil came later, from the adults that were manipulating them. But the sons and daughters of Germany that were to become its soldiers and die in an unjust cause should be regarded with pity rather than disgust. They suffered greatly and were used, very much like tools, taking faith in what they hoped was the better judgment of their leaders.
Much like the way we have taken faith in the judgment of our own leaders, and filmmakers for that matter, when they have counseled us that the only morally appropriate way to view these people is with abject hatred.
But now, lets take a look at several scenes from “Saving Private Ryan” which, as “Triumph of the Will” did, was more concerned with presenting a propaganda image rather than truth.
The first one that I remember is a moment where a Jewish soldier is standing next to a passing column of captured German soldiers holding up a Jewish symbol and gloating “I’m a Jew” at them in German. This scene is irresponsible for several reasons. First, it implies that US involvement in WWII had anything to do with the German treatment of their Jewish citizens. That wasn’t the case. We were involved because we got attacked at Pearl Harbor. This wasn’t a war of just ethnic protection, it was a war we fought because we got kicked in the balls. We didn’t know what was going on in Germany (at least, not officially, although with the way governments tend to lie about stuff it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that our president was completely aware of the holocaust and simply elected to do nothing) and, as history tells us, we didn’t find out about the holocaust until after the war was over. Although you could argue that the American soldier in Spielberg’s work is simply making his statement based on the publicly known anti-Semitic sentiment residing in Germany at the time, the implication of the scene is misleading. It suggest that the US forces were there to liberate the Jews and that every young German soldier was aware of what was going on and deserved to be taunted. Neither of these is true.
The second issue I have with “Ryan” is the issue regarding the captured German soldier that the American troupe elects to let go. There is the scene where the Americans force the soldier to dig his own grave, and he sits in it crying and screaming “Fuck Hitler,” and “God bless America,” until he wins the pity of the wimpy pacifistic American translator who pleads for his release. Based on the translator’s request, Tom Hanks’ character elects to let the German soldier go on the promise that he surrender himself to the next American platoon he comes across and does not carry arms against American forces any longer.
This seems all fine and dandy and a good example of kindness in the face of the insanity of war, when Spielberg makes the choice at the end of the movie to have the released German soldier return and go on a personal crusade against the American troupe, single-handedly killing the majority of them in an especially crude and outrageously euphoric manner. In one of the instances, the German soldier is perched over an American in an almost sensual embrace and he whispers to him quietly as he slowly plunges in his dagger. After this murder, the German solder goes striding by the pacifistic wimpy American translator, who crumbles to the ground and cries in pathetic horror over what he is witnessing. All of this leads up to the end of the movie when the wimpy American pacifist has the German renegade again under his power and this time, despite his passive nature, he does what Spielberg has been grooming us to see is absolutely necessary. That is, he kills him in cold blood.
What kind of a lesson is this? That every single German soldier was a blood-thirsty raving madman? That they were less than human? Do you realize that there were German propaganda films that created the exact same images regarding the Jews?
Now, I wouldn’t have had a problem if Spielberg had elected to use one of the Administrators of a Death Camp to paint this little picture, but to use just a common soldier is wrong. In an issue like this it is important to remember that the cancer lies at the top, and it is the lunatics at the top that are engaging in selfish, preposterous, lazy, insane governing that need to be held responsible and punished.
But maybe it is wrong for me to be so hard on Steven Spielberg, after all didn’t he grow up in the heart of American Propaganda? Wasn’t he told from the moment of his earliest childhood recollection that all German people of that age were horrific monsters that must be burned and destroyed at all cost? Wasn’t he constructed and programmed against the Germans just as the Germans were themselves constructed and programmed?
No, I don’t really blame Spielberg, just like I don’t really blame Leni Riefenstahl. They were both just people growing up in crazy times who were called upon by their government, in one way or another, to create propaganda films to serve some purpose. They are connected in that they were both extremely talented in creating their art, but flawed in that neither of them used their power to fight flawed engrained cultural beliefs and create understanding or contribute to the ongoing process of healing that is at the fundamental center of human evolution.
But it is terribly ironic isn’t it, that Spielberg would be the one who has proven himself to be most adept at utilizing the propaganda techniques that Hitler perfected?
The question I always have when it comes to the issue of the Nazis and the horror of the holocaust is this: why is it that nobody ever mentions that if America had been more gracious in victory after WWI, Nazi Germany might never have happened? The terms of the treaty of Versailles were too harsh, we put the people under an uncompromising yolk and chain and created the environment that gave birth to the holocaust. If we had been wiser, it wouldn’t have happened, doesn’t that make us responsible? Why are we always so content to lay all the blame on the other side? That’s just not the way the world functions.
And continuing with that thought, why don’t we hold the American members of the CIA who taught Osama Bin Laden all his terrorist tactics responsible for the world trade center attack? Or the American president who armed Saddam Hussein and turned his head while he murdered thousands of his own countrymen, and kept his head turned until he went after our oil?
There is an old saying out there that still has some relevance. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” What I’d really like to see is Steven Spielberg make a film that endorsed that kind of propaganda. Hell, I’d even like to see Leni Riefenstahl do it.
The End